


Better Angels

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, F/M, Gen, Idfic, Supernatural Domestic Comedy, Use ALL the Tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 08:18:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4012453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were three real close calls before he finally sat Raleigh down and said, no, dumbass, you don’t go to vampire bars, you go to regular bars and <i>be a mark</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Angels

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Confabulatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/gifts).



> Six days ago Confabulatrix said that under no circumstances would she write a supernatural domestic comedy AU, so of course I stepped forward like Frodo to bear that burden myself. 
> 
> Basically I lifted some arcs from Being Human.

Raleigh goes to Tendo for coffee advice, and tries everything the man gives him. Turkish, Death Wish, double shots, triple, doesn’t matter--he passes out hours before dawn anyway, and wakes up with sun in his eyes, alone in his room. 

“I could get a night job,” he offers once, when it’s technically morning but still dark and Mako is running her fingers through his hair (which she _knows_ will put him right out but she does it anyway), but he doesn’t mean it. Working while she’s up would defeat the purpose. 

Falling asleep defeats the purpose too, so they try to save the sex for when Raleigh’s already so tired he thinks everything is hilarious. And if he laughs while she’s moving above him, well, it’s only because he’s exactly where he wishes he could be all the time, if he could just stay awake that long.

Still, the best nights are the nights she falls asleep too, thoroughly spent and maybe a little wilfully reckless, and Raleigh wakes up just in time to shut the blackout curtains. Then he calls in to work, and sets about making it worth her while to be stuck at his place while the sun is up. 

\- - - 

Everyone has needs. Mako needs blood; Raleigh needs Mako. Yancy needs… well, there are only so many pigeon brains a guy can slurp. 

Outwardly he looks pretty close to normal. He doesn’t shamble or sprint as a habit and he’s only a little wan in bright sunlight if you look closely. Once he cuddled with a girl on the couch during a movie and she put her head on his chest and it didn’t dawn on her until act three that there was nothing beating in there, so that was awkward. Most people, though, would never notice there’s anything wrong with him. And Jaz has only gotten better at necromancy since then!

The best part is that he was actually-dead just long enough for his life insurance to pay out. And that means he can afford the best brains scientific research can provide. 

Of course, probably since there’s no oxygen flowing to _his_ brain, that didn’t even occur to Yancy until six months after he died, at which point he and Rals started asking around. 

The unscrupulous man they found wanted cash, but that’s fine, Yancy pays for everything with cash now (doesn’t own a cell phone; hasn’t updated his Facebook in forever). Raleigh went with him to the lab, which they entered through a side door in the alley. Once inside, Yancy almost did start to drool and shamble because even taking into account the jars of formaldehyde, he’d never seen anything so appetizing in either one of his lives. 

The biologist warned them to look but not touch, at least not until they paid up, haha, so Yancy picked out half a dozen of the biggest ones and handed over a wad of bills and they got a box and started to schlep them out to Raleigh’s car and walked into an almost-murder. 

“Call the police,” was the first thing she said to them when she looked up from some poor guy’s neck. Her voice was hoarse and garbled; she probably already had about two and a half pints in her. She backed away from the guy, who slumped down onto some trash bags, and for a second it looked like she’d try to bolt past them to the street, but then she got some focus in her eyes, and stared at Yancy. 

(It wasn’t until much later that he realized why: no pulse.) 

Yancy was at that moment holding a banker’s box full of brains, and wasn’t sure if the cops would be more interested in talking to him or her, and as he tried to work out that puzzle all he could think of to say was, “You’ve got red on you.” 

She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, which only smeared it. Raleigh cleared his throat, and then cleared it again. “Is he gonna be okay?” he asked, tilting his chin toward the trash bags. She finally looked away from Yancy and nodded, her hair swinging at her jawline, and then she staggered toward the street. 

“What did he do to you?” Raleigh asked as she passed him, and Yancy heard her footsteps stop, heard her try to keep her breathing steady through her nose. 

“Bought me a drink,” she answered, and disappeared around the corner. 

Yancy would have had goosebumps, if his skin still did that kind of thing. As it was he was plenty creeped, and then he turned and saw the look on Raleigh’s face, and Yancy filled his unused lungs and heaved out the sigh of the long-suffering dead. 

There were three real close calls before he finally sat Raleigh down and said, no, dumbass, you don’t go to vampire bars, you go to regular bars and _be a mark_. 

And the rest is--

\- - - 

Mako is old. 

Stacker is older. And when he found her, she was young. 

They traveled together, those first few years as she grew, so Stacker could protect her. Mako asked him again and again to make her like him. She thought it meant being unbreakable, thought it would purge all her fear, thought that the longer she lived, the further away her memories would be. 

He waited until she was grown and she understood that there was no distancing herself from the past, and then he offered her something red. 

After that, they traveled together so Stacker could educate her. He taught her moderation and respect. The world was changing and they were civilized people--there were ways to get what they needed without killing. 

Tamsin came and went like a trickster god, but she was with them for most of the important times. It was Tamsin who led them over the Wild Dogs and through Burragorang on a moonless night because the only way to get to the cabin was on foot and Tamsin could not be seen in even the general direction of Sydney. (She promised Mako she’d tell her that story someday, but she never got the chance.) 

It was Tamsin who stopped between the gum trees because she heard the noise first. Mako saw the cant of her head and listened too, and presently it came again on the breeze: a small, miserable sound with a frenetic pulse underneath. It was November, but the breeze was cold, and Mako smelled wormwood and goat’s blood. 

Mako asked Stacker for years to make her like him. She thought of death as a place you could avoid, not one you could come back from. 

Tamsin and Mako and Stacker stepped forward silently together, and up ahead Mako saw light. She looked back at Stacker, but he gave no indication that this was a trap. 

So Mako stepped forward into candlelight. 

Parchment, a stalk of yew, a hairbrush with a few long golden strands in the boar bristles--overkill for what should have been a straightforward process. The boy in the middle of the circles was twelve; his back turned to her, and he cried as he whispered the litany again. Mako sat on her heels just beyond the boundary and said, “How long has she been dead?”

The boy swallowed his invocation. His shoulders tensed, but he didn’t turn. When he found his voice, it cracked. “A year.” 

Mako swept her fingers through the flame of the red candle. Sensei had not yet allowed her to do for anyone else what he had done for her, and she was just starting to understand--to appreciate--the effect she could have on people. “What happened to her doesn’t have to happen to you.” 

Stacker spoke her name just as a new voice rang out from the other direction, and the boy grabbed the little ceremonial knife he’d made for himself and ran, breaking the circles. The man who walked out of the woods was pushing forty, weathered, hair the same as his son’s, a less shocking shade of red than Tamsin’s. 

The crossbow he carried was three hundred years old and still very functional; it was the kind of weapon that had a life of its own, that _wanted_ to send its wooden bolt into Mako’s heart. She tried to imagine what sorts usually wandered into the path of that crossbow, out here: bent and haggard and desperate as jackals, likely. “Why’re you here?” 

“Because we’re hunted,” Tamsin called. 

“By me and mine?” 

“And more,” said Stacker. 

It was only when the man saw Stacker that he lowered his crossbow. “Up the hill,” he said, and Tamsin took the invitation and went first. Sensei’s hand settled on Mako’s shoulder, and she got up and walked with him after Tamsin while the man stayed behind to kick the dusty circles away and feed the parchment to the candles. As she climbed Mako heard him say, “Don’t you think I tried?” 

There were entirely too many crucifixes in the little cabin, but crucifixes work better when they’re backed up by conviction, so it only stung her to stand there waiting as Herc Hansen prepared a needle and three vials. The boy hung back by the kitchenette, petting a wrinkly dog and glaring at all of them, but he came over when he was called and drew his father’s blood. 

Mako watched the vials fill, her hunger yawning wider. As Tamsin counted out a stack of bills Mako understood on an instinctive level that this exchange, this partnership, was something that Was Not Done. She also knew, because Sensei had told her, that these were the last days of war. 

But she didn’t know yet what Jaeger blood could do. Not until Chuck told her outright, some years later, as she was hovering behind him again and he thought he knew what she was thinking, “You can’t feed on me. My blood’ll kill you.” 

Mako set her hand on his neck. “What would my blood do to you?” 

His shoulders tensed the same way they did the first time. 

\- - - 

Raleigh gives up sleep for Mako, and Mako gives up blood for Raleigh. Not that he asks her to--in fact, shortly after he found her again, he about fell over himself to offer. “You’re sweet,” she said that night, nipping at the corner of his jaw, and it occurred to her that he probably _was_ , if the scent of his skin (like what she remembers of sunlight) was any indication. But she’s always tried to keep those two parts of her life separate. 

The sex is almost enough to make her forget. 

She should have listened to Sensei. _Moderation. Hunger is like an open wound._ But she tells herself she’s strong enough. She tells herself she has a reason, someone to be good for. 

She lasts a month. 

Canceling on him to go to a bar would, on its own, be cause for guilt, shame, confession. (As if she has a soul to cleanse.) Taking another man to the nearest alley feels less like cheating, the way she expected it to, and more like the point of no return. Feeding feels so _good_ , she was so hungry, but he’s not quite drunk enough, and he screams. 

Glutted, she sleeps through the next two days in her basement apartment, and misses the earliest headlines. When she finally does check the news, it surprises her. She remembers the sudden light in the alley and the first cop; the reports say there was a second. 

She turns off her phone. 

There is no facial composite or description of her in the news, and most importantly, someone made the bar’s security footage disappear. She owes them. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen, but they’re called contingencies for a reason. 

She thinks she can keep her head down--foolish, again. After a meal like that the hunger, when it hits, is worse than ever. That night she puts on an ancient hoodie she stole from Raleigh, and goes to the Thundercloud. 

When she walks in, no one looks up. A small mercy; there are just three people here who know it was her who made life a bit more difficult for their kind lately. She descends the stairs and crosses the ornate carpet through clouds of cigar smoke. There’s a jazz quartet onstage, and the violinist did sessions with Reinhardt. Cheung sits in on double bass. A handful of people are dancing. 

She’s criminally underdressed, but instead of tossing her out the way he would anyone else, Hu pours a glass of top shelf for her. Mako sits before it and her stomach whines at the smell. It’s still, stale. Not at all what she’s craving, no matter how pure. 

“You want to talk?” She shakes her head, and Hu turns to dry some glasses. 

She doesn’t want to talk, and she doesn’t want to drink, and those are the two things this place is good for, but she’s been in her apartment for two weeks and isn’t it strange how that can feel like eternity even though she’s been alive _so_ long, and anyway, where else would she go? 

To a bar. A regular one, hell with the risk. To find someone with full veins. And pull, carefully, let them drink more this time, stupid mistake, she’s not two hundred. Then to an alley, _carefully_ , just enough to knock them out, moderation, respect, warm, moving, alive blood in her mouth rich with oxygen and the knowledge that there is nothing beyond her in either the food chain or the evolution of this pitiful race, _respect, control_ , but hunger is like an open wound and she is an apex predator and no one will stop her-- 

That pounding in her ears is a pulse, and she’s not the only one who hears it. The music has died off. She looks up. Of course. 

The Thundercloud waits, but the Jaeger on the stairs does not carry himself in a way that suggests he’s there for trouble. By the time he reaches the bar, the band is playing again, louder, as if to cover this awkwardness. 

“Falling off the wagon’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Chuck says as he settles onto a stool next to Mako. 

She stares at the copper bar top, to avoid seeing his smirk. “Don’t you have better things to do right now?” 

“Loads. Never been so busy, in fact. So if I’m using my time to follow you in here, it must be for something pretty important.” 

Once Hu determines that this is probably not going to turn ugly in a way that involves charred flesh and inconvenient bloodstains on the carpet, he sets a highball glass on the bar. Chuck starts to wave him off, but Hu has put on welding gloves on and is using them to retrieve a tiny flask from a cabinet. Mako winces at the sight of engraved silver. 

Hu unscrews the cap and decants just enough azure liquid to cover the bottom of the glass. Chuck stares at him. “It’s distilled, a good vintage,” Hu assures him. “We keep it on hand for when your old man comes around.” 

In the mirror behind the bar Mako reads the conflict on Chuck’s face, and despite herself, she stifles a laugh. He hears, juts his chin, picks up the glass, swirls it experimentally. The contents cling to the sides, thick and mercurial and slightly luminescent. He has always wanted to be worldly, especially when she’s present. So he knocks it back. 

A flush creeps up from under the collar of Chuck’s jacket, and his eyes lose focus. The tilt of his head and crease of his brow suggests he’s watching--or listening to--something. Mako glances at Hu. “Memories of the dead,” he says, and that could mean two different things, but he doesn’t elaborate. 

Before Chuck has entirely returned to himself, Mako says, ”You have a message for me?” 

“A warning,” he grunts, checking the bottom of the glass for stray drops, but he downed it all and Hu locked the flask back up. Chuck pushes the glass away. “You know, there’s this lot--classy bastards with O negative in fine crystal--and then there’s the ones from the last century or two, and they’re all a bunch of pricks. Always looking for something to get away with.” 

“Hu,” Mako says, “he sounds just like his father. Pour another glass.” 

Chuck rolls his eyes. “Anyway. You had me fooled for a long time, thinking you were one of the former. You know how many of your kind I’ve had to put down in the last two weeks? They’re _plotting_ now. They all think it’s as easy as you made it look. Fortunately, some of us still care about keeping the peace.” 

Mako unclenches her jaw long enough to say, “What’s your warning?”

He swivels the stool to face her, one elbow on the bar, leaning in. “Find a source,” Chuck says, “and don’t fuck it up, Mori, because the next time you do this I’ll stake you like the God damned disgrace you are.” 

“You’ve had enough,” says Jin. 

Chuck looks over his shoulder. “You know your less-creepy brother just gave me a drink, yeah?”

“Which I see you’ve finished." Jin keeps his hands clasped at the small of his back, the picture of genteelness. "Try to understand, your being here is bad for business. You make people uncomfortable.”  

Chuck is turning red again. “Right, so the service I perform for your community--”

“Is not required here. You can leave through the back door, if you’d like to save face.” 

“Go f--”

“I’m going,” Mako tells Jin. She sets a stack of bills on the counter. “And he will too, once he’s waited long enough to not look like he’s following me.” She ignores Chuck’s snitty expression on her way up the stairs. 

Back in her apartment, she turns her phone on. She deletes fifteen texts without looking. There are only two voicemails, and the first is from an unknown number. 

She listens to Raleigh’s first. It’s timestamped two a.m., four days after she… four days after. “Hey,” he says, and then, “I.” His voice doesn’t have any of his customary two o’clock giddiness. “I. “ He takes a breath and lets it all tumble out. “Ijustwannaknowyou’reokay.” The message ends. 

Mako deletes it, and plays the other one. Ten fifty-eight p.m., two days after--just long enough for news to reach Stacker, wherever he and Herc are. “Mako,” Sensei says, and now her eyes sting. “We’ve worked hard for peace. If we’re going to maintain it, none of us can stand alone." He pauses for the space of three breaths. "I’ll always be here for you.” 

She scrubs at her face, then tugs a corner of the curtain back to look outside. It’s nearly dawn. Better hurry. 

Yancy’s the one who answers the door, and Mako can see in his eyes that the last two weeks of silence have made him hate her guts. She doesn’t blame him. She meets his flat gaze as long as she can, and then looks away. If there’s any hope of him letting her across the threshold, it lies in the fact that the one thing they have in common is hunger. 

But Yancy doesn’t invite her in, nor does he shut the door in her face. Instead he walks away and calls for Raleigh, and Mako waits, hearing the bed creak, his feet shuffle. When he comes into view, he’s the one who looks dead. Still, he sees her and his face opens up. “Come in,” he says.

She swallows and steps inside, latches the door, and waits. For a long time he watches her, and behind him, out the window and past the fire escape, the sky turns pink. She can see the questions in his eyes, but all he says when he finally speaks is, “Are you okay?” 

Mako shakes her head. 

“If you need to,” he says, “you can say you’re just here to bring back my hoodie.” 

She crosses her arms tightly, smelling him on the fabric, smelling him across the room, trying to ignore the sound of his pulse. “I need…” Mako shuts her eyes and turns her face away from him. “Raleigh, can I--”

“I was afraid you’d never ask,” he says, and when she looks at him again he has his left arm stretched out toward her, palm up, wrist exposed. 

She smothers the sound that threatens to escape her. “Do you have any needles?” She can do this carefully, _carefully_ , measure out a pint; this doesn’t have to hurt. 

Raleigh doesn’t move. “I’d rather feel your teeth.” 

Mako shivers. 

She closes the space between them, listens to his pulse rise, takes his hand, carefully, carefully, sets her teeth against the vein that meanders from the inside of his elbow down the muscle of his forearm, waits as he takes a breath, and then she bites. 

He tastes just like he smells and he’s warm and golden like sun on her eyelids in a past life and there’s something else, something she can’t place at first because she’s never had it, but after a moment she realizes it’s free-flowing willingness, the taste of something neither bought nor stolen, but given, and she lets out a faltering breath. 

The fingers of his other hand thread into her hair. He says her name. The sound claws its way out of her at last, choked and primal. “Mako, the sun.” She lets go and presses her palm to his wrist and he grabs the first aid kit and they flee past Yancy’s closed door and into Raleigh’s room, and she cleans the wound and wraps gauze around his wrist and runs her fingertips up that vein to his chest, and he puts his hand over hers, and he’s a little bleary-eyed, she took too much, _more control_ , next time she won’t need it so fiercely, in between she can live off what the Weis serve, she won’t go anywhere else ever again because nothing will ever taste like this. He is kissing her, she is undressing him, he is cradling her face in his hands, she is listening to his heartbeat, he is inside her, he is inside her, and outside the sun can burn everything, she has traded it for so much more. 

\- - - 

Yancy stares at the television, absolutely only at the television and nowhere else, and he thinks about calling Naomi. 

It’s a real bad idea: she, like everyone except Jaz and Rals, thinks he died nine months ago. When he goes out, which isn’t often, he sticks to parts of the city where he probably won’t run into anyone from that life. He doesn’t miss them, usually, but he misses Naomi. Her hair, her smile, her pretty much everything. And damn it, he’s just so tired of being the third wheel. 

On the couch across from him are a couple star-crossed assholes who keep trying to find new ways to PDA, like they don’t want to make him uncomfortable but on the other hand they totally do. At that moment Raleigh is circling Mako’s elbow with his thumb, which is just--is that a thing girls like? And this is Mako’s feeding day so before the movie they went to Raleigh’s room, and emerged five minutes later all flushed and grinning. Three months now he’s had to see stuff like that with his own two eyes. 

He should call Naomi. It’s only eleven. Maybe she’s out with friends. He could go to her apartment… oh, right, great idea. Dead man on the doorstep. She wouldn’t freak out at all. 

“Hey,” Raleigh says, “you gonna get that?” 

Yancy snaps his glare from the movie he's not really watching to his brother and almost says _Get what, jerk_ , but then he realizes that knocking sound isn’t part of the movie, it’s the door. And then he almost tells Raleigh to do it himself because what is he, the undead butler in this little Addams family, but Mako has just about fallen asleep leaning on Raleigh because of the elbow-rubbing thing, looking like the cat that ate some blood or something, and he’d have to watch Raleigh disentangle himself from her. 

So Yancy sighs and gets up and opens the door, and a guy with a crossbow over his shoulder says, “Is Mako here?” 

“Are those fang marks?” Yancy says. 

“Yeah,” the guy says, peevishly. He’s bleeding from most of them, and some cuts, and his nose. He shoves past Yancy, a little unsteadily. “Oi, Mori, I need to know where the Otachi coven’s bolthole is.” 

On the couch, Raleigh stares. Mako gently removes his hand from her elbow and gets up. She is, as far as Yancy can tell, exceedingly calm. “If you were followed--” 

The guy rolls his eyes. “They were all running _away_ from me, actually.” He staggers, catches himself on the back of the recliner. This seems to wake Raleigh up, and he gets off the couch and dashes to his room. The guy leans the crossbow against the recliner, all casual like. 

“You tried to take the whole coven.” 

“They’re gonna start a war, Mako. There’s no time to call in the reserves, all right? I need to finish this tonight.” 

Raleigh returns with the first aid kit and some gloves, and Yancy realizes this is a situation that calls for hard liquor, so he finds a bottle of Everclear in the back of a cabinet and brings some dish towels over. “We’re, uh, almost out of gauze,” Raleigh says. 

The guy glances at Raleigh’s wrist, and then at Mako, who hasn’t moved, and he says, “I can see that.” 

“How many bit you?” Mako asks.

“Thr--” he winces as he shrugs out of a heavy-looking leather jacket--”four.” He sits on the arm of the recliner. His left hand has been shredded; Raleigh wraps it with what remains of the gauze. Yancy finds a particularly red portion of the guy’s side and starts applying pressure with a towel. Blood blooms in the fabric. 

Mako glances away. “Vials?” 

“Used ‘em all--took out three more. Another two with stakes and two more with Dominique when they started to scatter.” 

Yancy meets Raleigh’s gaze. “Dominique?” The guy jerks his chin toward the crossbow. Oh. Right. 

“Some of these need stitches,” Raleigh says, glancing at Mako. 

“Nah, they don’t,” says the guy. 

Raleigh stares again. “You could be bleeding internally.” 

The guy waves him off with his good hand. “That tends to work itself out. I’ll be fine by morning.” 

Yancy tosses the now-soaked towel onto the kitchen floor and picks up a fresh one. He looks up in time to see Mako square her shoulders. 

“Keep him here,” she says. 

And of course the guy responds to that by trying to jump up, but Yancy presses harder on one of his wounds and Raleigh grabs his wrist, and the guy gives up after a minute. They all watch as Mako picks up the crossbow. She considers the bolts, and then goes to the kitchen, where she presses the point of each one against the towel on the floor. Yancy looks away. 

He keeps looking away when Mako comes back over and leans down to kiss Raleigh. In fact, he happens to be looking at the guy’s neck, and it’s turning bright pink. “Back soon,” Mako tells Raleigh. 

“And Chuck,” she adds on her way to the door. The guy looks up, still very sulking. “Eleven kills in one night is very impressive.” 

Chuck sulks a little less. 

Mako shuts the door behind her. “Oh hey, more blood,” Yancy says, changing out towels again. 

“It’ll stop soon.”

“One way or another, I guess,” Raleigh says as he tears a towel into strips. 

Chuck nods toward Raleigh’s wrist. “I’m only down a pint, mate. How about you?” 

Yancy sees Raleigh’s jaw twitch, so he shoves Chuck’s shoulder. “None of your business.” 

Chuck raises both hands. Raleigh takes that opportunity to wrap a strip of cloth around his side. “How many are left in the coven?” he asks. 

“You worried?” Chuck’s face does something between a sneer and a smirk. “She’ll get the job done. She’s the reason every fucking bloodsucker in this town thinks it’s time to bring on the apocalypse. You think someone else killed a mark and two cops in a back alley? Did you tell yourself she was better than that, _Rah_ leigh?”

Raleigh’s jaw twitches again, and he stands up and throws the rest of the strips at Chuck. 

Yancy gets right up in the guy’s face. “You don’t bleed all over a guy’s apartment and trash-talk his girlfriend while she’s out _doing your job_.” He stands up and takes the alcohol with him; this shithead can clot his own wounds. He follows Raleigh to the kitchen, opens the bottle, takes a swig even though it won’t do anything for him, and passes it to Raleigh. “How long are we waiting before we toss his ass out on the sidewalk?” 

Raleigh drinks, and looks out the window. “Until she comes back.” 

Yancy nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.” He goes to make coffee. 

\- - - 

Sunrise is still hours away, but inside the abandoned subway station the Otachi coven infested, one after another, bodies flare up and disintegrate. 

Stakes (or wooden crossbow bolts) cause the flesh of the ravenous undead to crumble. Jaeger blood _burns_. 

(Once, she and Sensei ducked into a temple in Chikhalgaon just as the sun broke over the hills, and the man who was chasing them screamed as he ignited. Mako was fourteen; she went to fetch water during the long day Stacker spent moving with the shadows, knowing her years of being useful to him in this way were numbered, that one day she would trade away this small and insignificant advantage.)

She fires another bolt into the mass of them, and then three are scaling the wall toward her spot, they're half-feral from starving themselves for weeks in preparation and she is freshly fed and as strong as she's ever been and this is about to get complicated--

(Legend has it that Herc Hansen once made a kill by punching someone right in the fangs. Tamsin walked to her last mission with three full vials of Jaeger blood and did not walk away after. Mako has fifteen bolts left, each tipped with a thin coating of Chuck’s blood.) 

She uses one as a stake on the first one that reaches her and dumps the body over the ledge where it burns up before it hits the ground, and then two are upon her and there isn’t space in the little alcove for a fight like this, but she only needs to scratch them with the tip, it works just the same, Jaeger blood isn’t picky, mouth or heart or under the skin, it burns. 

She is covered in ash when it’s over, and it happened fast, but not so fast that she didn’t get a headcount. 

As she tears home with a crossbow pounding against her back and a sound in her ears that’s not a pulse or the roar of the city but a terrible crushing tinnitus she can’t shake, she tries to hope. It doesn’t come easy for her, even on a good day. (Maybe Chuck killed twelve. Maybe the coven lost one recently. Maybe, maybe…) 

She turns onto Raleigh’s block, and the window above the fire escape is shattered. 

And then she’s at the door with no memory of taking the stairs, and Yancy is opening it and saying, “Who do I need to call, who do I need to call,” and he says it eight more times before he remembers and invites her in, and on the floor beneath the window in a spray of glass shards and dust Chuck has both hands pressed over a towel on the side of Raleigh’s neck, bright arterial blood leaking between his fingers. Raleigh’s eyes are closed, his face pale. Beneath Chuck’s pulse she can hear his, slow, weak. 

“Jaz can be here in ten minutes and bring him back,” Yancy says. He has Raleigh’s phone in his hand, screen lit up, keypad on display. 

It won’t work, Mako thinks, right before Chuck says it won’t work, and Yancy asks why and Chuck tells him, “Because he pushed me out of the way. You can’t bring back someone who made a choice.”

Yancy processes that for a moment and then says, “That’s the stupidest fucking rule I’ve ever heard.” 

“I didn’t make it,” Chuck snaps. 

“Okay, okay, I’m calling 911.” 

“You’re dead, she doesn’t show up on camera, and I would have a lot of explaining to do.” 

“You know what, fuck your secret order and your war, I’m taking him to the hospital.” 

“There’s no time,” Mako says, and both of them stare at her. She holds her hand out to Chuck, palm up. 

He looks in her eyes and she shows him he means it, and he takes his hands away from Raleigh’s neck and gets up without reaching for her. The sound Yancy makes as the blood starts to run freely again would hurt Mako if she were some other creature with a functioning heart. 

Mako sits on her heels where Chuck was, and touches Raleigh’s brow, feels the pulse flutter at his temple. Her other hand is still open, waiting. Presently Mako feels the rough-wrapped grip of a little knife, cobbled together from whatever could be found near a cabin in the Burragorang. She closes her fingers around it and nods her thanks. 

The blade is old, a little dull, a little ragged. It’s going to hurt, but it _should_. 

Mako slices her hand open, and Yancy says, “How long will it take?” 

Mako presses her palm to Raleigh’s lips, and Chuck looks away and says, “Not long.”

Mako pulls Raleigh upright and holds him, his head falling forward onto her shoulder, and Yancy says, “Will it hurt?” 

“It feels wonderful,” Mako says, and waits for Raleigh to wake up in her arms. 


End file.
